Human-centered wheelchairs: Bimanual gliding interface with heart rate monitoring

This paper presents a new wheelchair manipulation interface which is developed with bimanual gliding control interfaces. An important feature of the bimanual gliding control interface is performing intuitive manipulations when compared to conventional unilateral joystick interface. At the mean time, the bimanual gliding control interface also realizes the measurement of closed-line biopotential currents that flow in the thoracic volume conductor via a pair of surface electrodes placed on two gliding sensor modules. Therefore, the new designed bimanual gliding control interface does not only provide a feasible wheelchair manipulation interface, but also measure the user´s heart rate. Finally, a bimanual gliding (BG) wheelchair prototype is produced in this paper for performance evaluations.